In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (36 page)

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The Gals had supplied him with a prodigious quantity of food and élan, and after a week he had a real body again.  He was even almost mobile.  Today he had walked several steps without help.

Every day, Cleo grew more impatient with his lack of answers.

“I’m getting tired of this, Enkidu,” Cleo said.

“Tired of what?” Enkidu said.  He was tired of the damned bed.  Hunters didn’t belong in beds.

“What happened to you?  How did you survive?”

He turned his head away and Cleo frowned.  “You almost died.  I’m actually shocked you didn’t die.  You know how little was left of you when we found you?  Come on, lover.  I want to help you.”  She smiled her toothy smile and held him close.  His almost death had rattled her badly.

“Who else knows about what happened?”

She shook her head.  “Nobody.  If somebody wants you dead, the last thing they need to learn is that you’re alive and vulnerable.  We put work into lying low.”

Smart woman.  He owed her, he always owed her, but this time he didn’t have anything to give her.  “I don’t know how I survived.”  He had thought about the ghosts for days now, wondering where they came from.  The Enkidu ghost had smelled of the storm, the wind, the messages he heard in the thunder and learned from the dawn clouds.  He had always been better at reading the weather than any of the other Hunters.  He now suspected weather reading was only a minor use of this particular ability.

Cleo sighed.  “Okay.  But…who the fuck killed you?  What happened?”  She snuggled next to him, and the warmth of her leathery hide against his side was comforting.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Right.  So you don’t talk and pretend you’re recovering slower than you really are.”  Cleo arched her back, and wiggled her half-Monster form seductively at him.  She shook her head, and a sinuous tremor snaked down the length of her torso, waving the line of downy tufts that started on her head and went down to the small of her back.  Normally, he couldn’t resist her when she did that.  She gave him an open-mouthed grin, showing her Monsterish pointy teeth.  “I want to know, anyway.”

Enkidu sighed.  “It’s dangerous information.  I’m not sure what you’d do with it, anyway, since you’re just a woman.”

His comment would normally buy him a reprieve, as Cleo went into her “I’m no woman, I’m a Pack Alpha, and don’t you forget it!” routine.  Too much cultural contamination from the television, he figured.  The world was filling with uppity women.  He had tried taking the television away from her and the other Gals, but they raised such hell he had to give the TV back.  They loved the damned thing too much.

This time, no reprieve.  “Give it a rest,” Cleo said.  “I need to know, dammit.  We count on you.”  Wiggle wiggle.  He reached over to run his claws gently along her iridescent line of scales, and got his hand slapped.

He sighed.  “If you want to know, I’ll spill,” Enkidu said.  This particular secret had been bothering him for months, and with things coming to a head and his recent death, it gnawed at him.  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”  He cleared his throat.  “Our Master is a Crow.”

“You’re shitting me,” Cleo said, flopping flat on her belly, beside him.  “Wandering Shade is a Crow?  But he can’t be!  Crows are worthless shiftless scaredy-cats.”

“He’s a Crow.  Look, he’s got all these Crow contacts, and he’s got the ability to externally manipulate both élan and dross.  That’s all Crow stuff.  I got the information confirmed by an outside source.  What else could he be?”

“Why doesn’t he act like a Crow, then?”

“He’s insane.  Our Master is an
insane
Crow.”  He had figured out the insanity part of the puzzle all on his own.

Cleo thought for a few moments.  “Okay.  Say he’s an insane Crow that doesn’t act like a normal Crow.  So what?”

“So what?  He’s setting up for some kind of war against the Focuses and their organization, and we’re going to be his soldiers, that’s what.  Do you want to be following an insane leader using scaredy-cat Crow strategies into a war?  Crows are prey, dammit!”  Wandering Shade’s pathetic strategy and tactics?  Exactly what Enkidu expected from a Crow.

“He’s always been, well, a little screwy,” Cleo said.  She growled and bared her teeth at Enkidu.  “You just never believed me.  Now, it’s too late.”

Enkidu nodded.  Cleo had always distrusted Wandering Shade.  After he found out from Gilgamesh that Wandering Shade was a Crow, he found he no longer trusted his Master either.  In fact, he now analyzed everything Wandering Shade did: his causes, his hates, and his passionate hates.  Nothing made sense to Enkidu – until he figured out his Master wasn’t just a Crow, but an insane Crow.  “We don’t have anywhere else to go.  Somehow, I don’t think the Focuses would welcome us.  Not after everything we’ve done.”

“How about the talking Arm, Hancock?”

“I’d rather die,” Enkidu said.  “Besides, how would you react?  You met her.  She almost killed you, remember?”

Cleo hissed.  “Yesss.  I’d love to sink my teeth into the
bitch
.  So, having ascertained we have no friends in the world, did you come up with any other way out of this?  Any ideas at all?”

“No.  What’s worse, I’m not in our Master’s good graces.  Never have been, to tell you the truth.  He sneers at me and calls me his ‘prize survivor’.  Despite the fact I’m the one who’s put together the Hunter civilization for him.  I tried to talk about my discovery to Odin, but he wouldn’t hear anything bad about our Master.  We fought.  I lost.”

Cleo winced.  “That was stupid.  Odin has the open mind of a closed steel trap.”

Enkidu sighed.  Wandering Shade had been furious over his rampage in Detroit, and for some unknown reason blaming him for the Talking Arm’s strange attack on Odin’s farm.  Enkidu had finally decided to act on his information about his Master, but talking to Odin was obviously the wrong thing.  So now he was in the doghouse over Detroit, got to spend several hours dead, and the Detroit rampage hadn’t even worked.  He never found any further sign of those Arm-Focuses or their backer.

“But there’s your answer,” Cleo continued.  “Survive.  You’re right, Enkidu.  You
are
a survivor.  It’s your strength.  Let’s use this.  Make sure you’re not on the front lines in his fight.  Make sure we all survive the fight.  Come up with some intelligent contingency plans for once.”

“You’re talking treason, Cleo.”

“Treason?  Against a Crow?”  Cleo laughed.  “I’m not sure that’s possible.  We always thought Wandering Shade had honor.  If he’s a Crow, and he’s been hiding what he is from us for so long, well then, he’s just been fooling us.  Breaking his own Law. 
He has no more honor than any other Crow.
”

Enkidu smiled.  “There is that.”

Cleo waved her line of tiny feather tufts at him, and he pounced.

Tonya Biggioni: November 19, 1968

“Hancock’s the Commander,” Geraldine said.  She sat on the edge of one of Tonya’s guest chairs and leaned forward intently.  “I have no doubts about it.”

Tonya’s stony aplomb vanished in a wave of shivering, and she turned her head for privacy as she fought for and regained control.  She had been
this close
to bagging Hancock, and in just ten days her entire effort had collapsed beyond her worst nightmares.  Zielinski’s offices had become the Texas Crow headquarters, making him an impossible target.  The Detroit Chimera rampage shook the Council to its core, to where both Suzie and Polly had ordered Tonya to finish reeling in Hancock ‘one way or another’.  Yesterday.  Delia came out of this mess with a crazy and unexpected Arm tag, prattling on about how Hancock was far easier to deal with than Keaton and how the Arm had healed her from a likely fatal wound.  Healed!  Geraldine, kidnapped and returned whole, had witnessed the captivity of a Focus by the Chimeras, and now she spouted nonsense about ‘the Commander’.

The damned Crow Sky was the catalyst for this entire thing.  If she ever got another chance to wring his thick neck, this time she wouldn’t hesitate.

“She admits it?” Tonya said, a whisper.

“She denies being the Commander, she doesn’t understand what being the Commander means, but she’s cutting the Crows some slack when they use the title.”  Geraldine paused.  “You know the dreams and night time whispers as well as I do.  She healed Delia using a juice trick.  I saw her
heal
, dammit, with my own eyes and metasense.”

Unexpected tears gathered in Tonya’s eyes.  Rage warred with horror inside her mind.  She had lost Geraldine to a goddamned Arm!  She had orchestrated the destruction of the Commander!

She should have seen the signs herself.  Back from the dead.  Healing.  Military leadership.  The overthrowing of the old order.  The denial of the honors.  She missed them because she wasn’t a believer.  The Commander myth was far too supernatural to be real.

The last always swung the argument in her mind.

Tonya turned back to Geraldine, the mist in her eyes gone.  “There is no Commander.”  And if there was, the karmic debt Tonya owed Hancock for orchestrating her destruction would destroy Tonya anyway.  Denial was the only logical way forward.  “You’re seeing shapes in the patterns of events where no shapes exist.  In the end, this will turn out to be an illusion.”

“You aren’t going to tell the Council about what I witnessed, are you?” Geraldine said.  She paled to stark white and Tonya smelled the sweat on her palms.

“I told Polly already,” Tonya said.  “She ordered me to keep it quiet.  This is on Polly’s shoulders now, not ours.”

Lori’s phone call had been the worst.  Tonya had given her word to Lori that if real evidence appeared, she would bring up the kidnapping of Focus Frasier to the Council herself.  Tonya’s refusal undercut two months of work to weaken Lori’s internal mental support and her external Focus support for the rebellion.  The refusal now became Lori’s chief public evidence of Tonya’s corruption and malfeasance.  With only two and a half months to go before the Northeast Region meeting, where the election for the Council seat would be held, Tonya didn’t have much time to recover.  The only real option remained the Hancock problem, which needed to be solved by the late January meeting, and her only way forward was what she privately termed ‘political nuclear war’: exposing Hancock to the FBI and the press.  Hancock would retaliate, they would likely destroy each other, and they might take down every American Major Transform in the process.

She sensed Geraldine wavering as she stared at Tonya from across Tonya’s desk.  The horror inside returned: the only way Tonya would be able to keep her seat was if she used the same blackmail tactics that Suzie Schrum and the other first Focuses used.  Something she had vowed never to do.

“I’m not sure I can do this, Tonya,” Geraldine said.  She didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the political tide, always a powerful force among the Focuses.

“I’m not sure I can, either,” Tonya said, very quiet.  “I’m not sure what to do.  I’ll come up with something, though.”

---

“You haven’t called in ages, babe,” Keaton said.  Tonya smiled at Keaton’s voice and ignored the Arm’s lie.  For once, Keaton had returned a ‘call please’ message left with her answering service.

“I’ve got an offer for you.”

“Right.  Sure.  Babe, you’re not going through channels.  This sounds rather sweet.”

Keaton always sounded like someone new whenever Tonya talked to her, an affectation, trying to psych Tonya into believing Keaton was around the bend.  Today, Keaton sounded like she was high on drugs.

Someone screamed in the background.  Probably her Arm trainee.  Tonya didn’t want to know.

“I’m not going through channels because it involves having you move.”

“Move?  I thought the word you’d be using was ‘mediate’.  Fuck this…”  Keaton hung up.

Tonya waited.  The God damned turf hungry Arms were rather predictable.  Right about…

The phone rang.

“The offer is approximately two million five hundred thousand dollars of stolen military hardware, and it’s to a city I know you claim,” Tonya said.  Tonya wanted to strangle someone for this.  The price was about $300 a Transform for each living Transform in the nation. This was a criminal waste of money.

“I’m not doing
anything
blind, not even for that much payola,” Keaton said.  “Who’s behind it, babe?”

“I don’t know,” Tonya said.  “I have my guesses, if you want to hear them.”

“I’m not even going to listen to this heavy shit unless you can come up with some real information.”

“I got this offer through Suzie Schrum.  She’s not happy about it because, well, to tell you the truth, she’d rather find some way to fence the hardware and keep the money.”  Actually, Suzie had made a half-serious suggestion that they fake Keaton’s acceptance, fence the hardware, and split the money.  Get Keaton in trouble for welching on the deal.

“One of the other first Focuses, then, babe.  In that case, I know the city and the debutante who’s behind it, and why,” Keaton said.

Sweat seeped into Tonya’s dress, typical for a conversation with Keaton.